It’s our last week here in the University of Manchester’s Sackville St Building. The shelves are emptying, boxes are filling and we’re all overcome with bittersweet emotions; the excitement about our future in Manchester Central Library mixed with the melancholy of leaving somewhere we’ve called home for the past few years. I get terribly sentimental about buildings I’ve inhabited – it’s as if I leave a little bit of myself behind every time I move on somewhere new.

But if these walls could talk they’d have more interesting things to talk about than my short stay here.

The Sackville Street Building is a huge, grand, disheveled, labyrinthine, multiple personality building, based on the University of Manchester’s North Campus; some will remember it as the UMIST Main Building, before the two universities merged in 2004. Renaissance architectural motifs, grand halls and stained glass windows rub up against mind-blowing technology facilities…